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The use of lab animals to develop new medicines, cosmetics and pesticides could be eliminated by virtual experiments on computer, say European researchers.

The virtual tests could be run using computer models that draw on a vast database of information about chemical compounds.

And the system could also help develop new compounds in record time, the researchers say.

Developing new chemical compounds consists of multiple steps, from identifying an active chemical among millions of potential leads to pinpointing a target.

Finding an effective chemical requires a lot of mixing and matching of compounds in the lab.

But access to a centralised database of chemical candidates under development, known as Chemomentum, could help researchers save some lab time, and lab animals.

Modelling tools available in the software could be used to optimise the chemical structure of the compound and analyse whether those changes make it interact better or worse with a potential target.

Once the right chemical compound is pinpointed, it needs to be tested for effectiveness as well as toxicity. Classic toxicity tests are done by exposing animals to increasing doses of a chemical.

At a low dose no effect is seen; at a high dose, all animals die. The right dose is somewhere in between. Based on such animal tests, the lethal dose of a chemical is extrapolated to humans.

According to the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, 100 million animals are used in laboratories to tests range of goods, including household products, cosmetics, food additives, pharmaceuticals, and industrial and agricultural chemicals, to name a few.

Mathilde Romberg, a research fellow at the University of Ulster in the UK and one of the principal investigators on the Chemomentum project, hopes the new system can reduce those numbers.

Romberg has partnered with experts at eight universities, institutes and companies from France, Germany, Italy, Estonia and Switzerland to compile the system.

She says the user-friendly program should "help the chemical industry and European regulatory bodies evaluate the substances and assess related risks, with fewer and fewer animal tests."

In theory, experimental tests may not be necessary with Chemomentum. Rather, users would input information about the leads and targets they are interested in and the system would return the corresponding toxicity predictions.

The software will be designed to perform calculations using standard PCs or draw upon the computing power of PC clusters - also known as grid computing - to crunch more complex data expeditiously.

At the moment, the models that predict toxicity are new and people are sceptical about using them, said Paolo Mazzatorta, a scientist in the Chemical Food Safety Group at Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland.

But experimental tests are expensive and that could eventually drive more interest in predictive modelling.

"I think there will come a moment when this science will be more mature and it will be used," he says.